Mme de Stael

MME DE STAËL

GERMAINE NECKER ( 1766-1817) or, to give her the
name under which she won fame, Mme de Staël, was
the daughter of the Swiss banker Necker, who made fruitless
attempts to reform the finances of France, and of his wife,
renowned by her salon. As a girl she was an excellent example
of the infant phenomenon of her sentimental environment.
She was the emotional disciple of Rousseau, as Mme Roland
was the heroic one. The elopement of Clarissa Harlowe, she
afterwards said, was the principal event of her youth, the reading
of Werther being another turning-point. At the age of ten she
wanted to marry her mother's former lover, Gibbon, in order to
keep so much genius in the family, and spent much of her time
discussing love with the guests at her mother's gatherings. This
compound of brains and emotion was, by her ambitious mother,
married to the Swedish envoy in Paris, the baron de Staël-
Holstein. After a while they lived together only at intervals;
Mme de Staël was too intellectual for her husband, but she
did him the service of paying his debts. The prominence of
her family and her position, as well as her fondness for talking
and dabbling in politics, kept Mme de Staël in hot water all
her life; she incurred the violent hatred of Bonaparte, who
delighted in persecuting her and banished her from Paris. He
was thoroughly justified in so doing, from his point of view, for
Mme de Staël was a most potent anti-Napoleonic force in Europe.
But it was torture to one who longed for the excitement of the
capital. In spite of her fine estate at Coppet, near Geneva,
where people came to see her, she was restless and unhappy:

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Publication Information: Book Title: A History of French Literature. Contributors: C. H. Conrad Wright - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1912. Page Number: 609.